Results by "Julian Barnes" in All categories

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour, and wit. Maybe Adrian was more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

Departure(s) is the story of a man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. It is the story of an elderly Jack Russell called Jimmy, enviably oblivious to his own mortality. It is also the story of how the body fails us, whether through age, illness accident or intent. And it is the story of how experiences fade into anecdotes, and then into memory. Does it matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it just matter that it mattered enough to be remembered?

Flaubert’s Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad, with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam, and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.

This is one of the defining novels of English writer Julian Barnes. An entertaining melange of stories starting with a contemporary account of the launch of Noah's Ark takes us into unexpected areas of human foibles, activities, and tendencies.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards 2020 The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’...

In a collection that is wise, funny, clever and moving, Julian Barnes has created characters whose passions and longings are made all the stronger by the knowledge that, for them, time is almost at an end.

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in...

Brought to you by Penguin. The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own...

In May 1937, a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the ‘Big House.’ Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to ever return...

Der sowjetische Starkomponist Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Schostakowitsch gehört zu den renommiertesten Komponisten seines Landes, als Stalin eines Abends der Aufführung einer seiner Opern beiwohnt und schon in der Pause den Saal verlässt. Schostakowitsch wartet ab diesem Abend Nacht für Nacht angezogen, auf seinen gepackten Koffern sitzend neben dem Aufzug seiner Wohnung, dass er verhaftet wird. Doch niemand kommt. Stattdessen feiert er Erfolge mit seiner Fünften Symphonie und wird wieder Liebling der Massen. Aber nun muss er sich ungewollter Privilegien erwehren, die mit der Vereinnahmung durch die Partei einhergehen.

Als Adrian Finn in die Klasse von Tony Webster kommt, schließen die beiden Jungen schnell Freundschaft. Sex und Bücher sind die Hauptthemen...

Introducing Stuart, Gillian and Oliver. One by one they take their turn to speak straight out to the camera - and give their side of a contemporary love triangle. What begins as a comedy of misunderstanding slowly darkens and deepens into a compelling exploration of the quagmires of the heart.

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and...

This novel is based on Arthur Conan Doyle's extraordinary real-life fight for justice. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer, George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age; George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

The adolescent Christopher and his soul mate, Toni, had sneered at the stifling ennui of Metroland, their cosy patch of suburbia on the Metropolitan line. They had longed for Life to begin - meaning Sex and Freedom - to travel and choose their own clothes. Then Chris, at 30, starts to settle comfortably into bourgeois contentment himself. Luckily, Toni is still around to challenge such backsliding.

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. He constructs on the island 'The Project', a...

Beginning with an unlikely stowaway’s account of life on board Noah’s Ark, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission....

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writer's endgame. “A culmination . . . shimmering with [Barnes’s] silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the...

“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.” First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his...